On the last hope of longevity

Well, this is it. The bastards have seemingly won. The skies are grey and so are the buildings, the last semblance of hope hits the windshield with the ferocity of a drunken man who has just realised he wasted his gawd-given life. The time has not yet come to enter the bunkers, but a nuclear winter is not something to be scoffed at. No, the time has come to crawl through the cracks in our brutalist concrete state of complete ridiculousness. Time, time, time. Is there ever not enough of it?

The fear is setting in and soon we will all be lining up to receive our government approved injections of serotonin and vitamin c. The cocaine’s too expensive so we drown ourselves in a delicious pool of opiates- the drugs of the mentally ill contributing, of course, to the bizarre collective breakdown of society. Hug your family tight and whisper the most beautiful words you could ever have dreamt, because we are all slowly sinking into an apocalyptic fury in which the Murdoch family reign supreme. Welcome to the end days, I hope you brought a nice woolly jumper to keep you warm.

Come on guys, we all keep speaking the same lines. The internet, the new-found nucleus of our pathetic lives, is commodifying everything into easily consumable, easily disposable mundanity. You know it, I know it, but how do we change it? Fuck, I can’t give the answer, otherwise I’d be a fucking rich man. Maybe all the good original ideas have been taken, and so greatness stretching beyond fifteen seconds, let alone fifteen minutes, is a thing of the past. But this feels wrong. There is surely still something, somewhere, out there, that doesn’t have a blink-and-you’ve-missed it shelf life.

As the late, great Lou Reed said, “It’s hard to give a shit these days”. But if everything was easy, wouldn’t everything would be equitably shit? Whatever. Shrug off your troubles and wank yourself into irrelevance- the world won’t care. Or if you feel you have something worth caring about, that could stand up to the test of time and truly make a difference- make the world care about you, make yourself impossible to dispose of- embrace what is difficult and fuck it into submission. The age of the instant is upon us, and whilst in some ways this is liberating in terms beyond expression, it is turning us as human beings into vapid, shallow idiots. Start caring again, rediscover that feeling where you felt involved with what you loved. Invest into continuity. Support your local record shops, and explore music beyond that one song you liked on the Spotify ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist, but didn’t bother to remember its name. Music Journalists, stop writing public relations flattery for people whose music is shit, and who don’t care about you. Aim for timelessness, because as always, there is less time left than you think.